Supernintendo
29 reviews liked by Supernintendo
It’s a fun game, but it lacks charm. Ganon fight was peak tho.
During your first playthrough it feels absolutely magical, like nothing youve played before. After completing it and letting it simmer on your thoughts youll start to see the faults and problems it has MUCH much clearer
Playing this as a kid I thought the visuals and atmosphere were amazing. Having fully finished all these years later I still think this game does so stuff well. The combat system is unique and surprisingly never got old to me and made me engage more with the systems in place. The story is good and has some really great parts. While I feel like there are RPGs on the console I like a lot more, I still think this is a game that should be experienced at least once.
In the early 90s, there were two lonesome souls who, amongst all the odds, managed to find each other, fell in love, and started a relationship. These two lovebirds were known as Nintendo and Sony. They cherished the time they spent with each other, and together, they were working to bring a brand new piece of revolutionary tech to the world known as the Nintendo PlayStation. However, it was then that tragedy struck, as Sony had then found out that Nintendo had cheated on them with another company known as Phillips, and from that day, Sony and Nintendo would be the biggest of enemies. This would ultimately benefit Sony, as they would go onto then create the Sony PlayStation, a revolutionary piece of tech that would be praised, and would lead to many other successes for years to come. As for Nintendo, however, they would not be so fortunate with their decisions. From this new love affair came another piece of tech known as the Phillips CDI, a console that many have loathed and despised for generations, as well as a set of brand new games that were made thanks to Nintendo giving them permission to. These games would then go on to also be loathed for many years to come, even more so then the console itself, and one of these games would be known as Link: The Faces of Evil.
If you are familiar with the Zelda franchise, then I am sure you have heard about this game at some point in your life. It is widely regarded to be one of the absolute WORST games of all time, let alone from the Zelda franchise, and while it may have initially had a positive reception, it has gone on to be reviled and made fun of all the way to this very day. I myself have known about this game, along with the other Zelda CDI games, for a long time, thanks to the videos made by PeanutButterGamer, and while they did indeed look awful, I had wanted to try them out SO BADLY, just to see how bad they really were. I was never able to figure out how to run a proper CDI emulator, which meant I thought I would never get the chance. However, then I heard about a little fan remaster of these games by a guy named Dopply, and of course, I jumped on it as soon as possible.
I decided to play The Faces of Evil first, because that was the first of the bunch I had heard about, and after beating the whole thing, I think that I may actually be crazy… because I actually found the game to be somewhat good? Don’t get me wrong, there is PLENTY about this game that is terrible, and in terms of the original version of the game, there was plenty there as well that amplified how bad it was even more. But, based on what I had played, I actually didn’t think it was all that bad. Of course, a lot of this is thanks to the remaster of the game making a lot of changes to make the game better, but even on its own, I still managed to have a good time with it, both genuinely and ironically.
The story is extremely simple for a Zelda game, with Link going off to Koradai to stop the “Faces of Evil”, but then UH OH, Zelda has been kidnapped, so now he has to go save her as well, which is pretty straightforward for the series this is, but honestly, if we got anything more complicated than that, then the universe might actually explode, so this is fine, the graphics… certainly vary in quality, with the main game itself looking fine, even if there is a lot of problems with the environments that I will bring up later, and as for the cutscenes… we’ll hold off on those for now, the music is actually pretty good, with there being plenty of tracks I fondly remembered from the game, and I enjoyed quite a bit, but of course, they don’t compare to the tracks from other Zelda games, the control was originally, from what I have seen and heard, complete dogshit, but thankfully, the remaster makes things MUCH more simple and easy to control, so thank god I never had to deal with any of that, and the gameplay is somewhat familiar with the Zelda series, but made much more simple and tedious as a result.
The game is a 2D action-adventure game, where you take control of Link, go through many different locations through the land of Koradai, defeat many different monsters along the way (and I do mean many), gather plenty of helpful items that will either increase your stats or help with completing certain quests, talk to many different colorful characters that you will find throughout the land for useful information, and take on plenty of bosses that would be challenging, except most of them go down with a single hit most of the time. For the most part, it sounds pretty straightforward, and since it takes on the style of Zelda II rather than a traditional Zelda, there are a lot of interesting elements to be found here that do make for a unique experience. However, there is a LOT holding it back, so we may as well go through all of the negatives before saying why the game actually isn’t all that bad.
First off, we may as well address the elephant in the room: the cutscenes. If you know anything about this game, or any of the other Nintendo CDI games, chances are it is related to these cutscenes, with there being plenty of them that show up throughout the entire game. If you don’t know about them, let me be the first to tell you then… these cutscenes are AWFUL. Their animation is some of the worst I have ever seen in a game, the characters move around very unnaturally, the voice acting is really bad, the line delivery is extremely goofy and amateur, the dialogue is repetitive and generic, and they have gone down as some of the worst cutscenes in video game history. However, with all that being said… I can’t help but love them. These cutscenes fall in the same category as The Room, where they are so bad that you can’t help but adore every second of them, and I am sure that for anyone who knows this game, they can quote plenty of lines from this almost exactly. That’s how iconic they are.
As for the game itself though, it also has its fair share of problems. Just to go through them really quickly, there are way too many enemies that can be on screen at once, a lot of items you need to grind money for, even very early on in the game, the control in order to do anything can be pretty wonky, even when doing something as simple as opening a menu, the bosses completely suck, you have to refight a good number of them multiple times, some of the NPCs don’t help you out whatsoever, and what is quite possibly the worst problem this game suffers from, the background and foreground. Everything in the areas you go to look the exact same when compared to each other, so there will be plenty of times where you can’t determine what you can and can’t interact with, leading to a lot of unneeded frustration. Granted, while a good amount of these problems are tweaked with in the remaster of the game, a lot of the problems are still there, making it still a pretty bad game at the end of the day.
With all that in mind though, I still managed to have a good time with the game. Yes, a lot of it is still pretty bad, and the game is repetitive enough to where it can get boring at times, but it did feel satisfying getting through a lot of these levels, and I did manage to have a fun time with slashing through these enemies and getting these items. Not to mention, a lot of the worse elements of the game, such as the cutscenes and the pathetic bosses, do add a lot of charm to the game in a way, and make it much more enjoyable. I always wanted to keep moving forward, because even if what I faced would be annoying, I would be given a garbage cutscene at the end of it, which makes up for everything at the end of the day. Seriously, when you hear Ganon say “Join me Link, and I will make your face the GREATEST in Koradai… or else you will DIE”, you simply just cannot completely hate this game. It is impossible.
Overall, despite the many, MANY problems that hold this game down, and the infamous reputation that it has gotten over the years, I surprisingly ended up really liking my time with Link: The Faces of Evil. Of course, a lot of that is thanks to the remaster, but even then, a lot of it I just can’t help but really like, and while I definitely probably won’t be playing it ever again, I am glad to say that I finally got to witness it in all of its glory. I would definitely recommend that any Zelda fan, or anyone in general, play or witness the game at least once in their lives, but for your own sake, DO NOT play the original version. Play the fan made remaster, because it manages to make the game a lot more bearable, while still keeping a lot of that awful charm perfectly intact. And hey, while we may all shit on these games for the dumpster fire that they are, we have to give them credit at the end of the day for inspiring many other works, such as this one game called Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore, which is being made to be a direct spiritual successor to this game, along with the other Nintendo CDI games. If you somehow aren’t excited for that game, then you my friend don’t know what true art is.
Game #438
If you are familiar with the Zelda franchise, then I am sure you have heard about this game at some point in your life. It is widely regarded to be one of the absolute WORST games of all time, let alone from the Zelda franchise, and while it may have initially had a positive reception, it has gone on to be reviled and made fun of all the way to this very day. I myself have known about this game, along with the other Zelda CDI games, for a long time, thanks to the videos made by PeanutButterGamer, and while they did indeed look awful, I had wanted to try them out SO BADLY, just to see how bad they really were. I was never able to figure out how to run a proper CDI emulator, which meant I thought I would never get the chance. However, then I heard about a little fan remaster of these games by a guy named Dopply, and of course, I jumped on it as soon as possible.
I decided to play The Faces of Evil first, because that was the first of the bunch I had heard about, and after beating the whole thing, I think that I may actually be crazy… because I actually found the game to be somewhat good? Don’t get me wrong, there is PLENTY about this game that is terrible, and in terms of the original version of the game, there was plenty there as well that amplified how bad it was even more. But, based on what I had played, I actually didn’t think it was all that bad. Of course, a lot of this is thanks to the remaster of the game making a lot of changes to make the game better, but even on its own, I still managed to have a good time with it, both genuinely and ironically.
The story is extremely simple for a Zelda game, with Link going off to Koradai to stop the “Faces of Evil”, but then UH OH, Zelda has been kidnapped, so now he has to go save her as well, which is pretty straightforward for the series this is, but honestly, if we got anything more complicated than that, then the universe might actually explode, so this is fine, the graphics… certainly vary in quality, with the main game itself looking fine, even if there is a lot of problems with the environments that I will bring up later, and as for the cutscenes… we’ll hold off on those for now, the music is actually pretty good, with there being plenty of tracks I fondly remembered from the game, and I enjoyed quite a bit, but of course, they don’t compare to the tracks from other Zelda games, the control was originally, from what I have seen and heard, complete dogshit, but thankfully, the remaster makes things MUCH more simple and easy to control, so thank god I never had to deal with any of that, and the gameplay is somewhat familiar with the Zelda series, but made much more simple and tedious as a result.
The game is a 2D action-adventure game, where you take control of Link, go through many different locations through the land of Koradai, defeat many different monsters along the way (and I do mean many), gather plenty of helpful items that will either increase your stats or help with completing certain quests, talk to many different colorful characters that you will find throughout the land for useful information, and take on plenty of bosses that would be challenging, except most of them go down with a single hit most of the time. For the most part, it sounds pretty straightforward, and since it takes on the style of Zelda II rather than a traditional Zelda, there are a lot of interesting elements to be found here that do make for a unique experience. However, there is a LOT holding it back, so we may as well go through all of the negatives before saying why the game actually isn’t all that bad.
First off, we may as well address the elephant in the room: the cutscenes. If you know anything about this game, or any of the other Nintendo CDI games, chances are it is related to these cutscenes, with there being plenty of them that show up throughout the entire game. If you don’t know about them, let me be the first to tell you then… these cutscenes are AWFUL. Their animation is some of the worst I have ever seen in a game, the characters move around very unnaturally, the voice acting is really bad, the line delivery is extremely goofy and amateur, the dialogue is repetitive and generic, and they have gone down as some of the worst cutscenes in video game history. However, with all that being said… I can’t help but love them. These cutscenes fall in the same category as The Room, where they are so bad that you can’t help but adore every second of them, and I am sure that for anyone who knows this game, they can quote plenty of lines from this almost exactly. That’s how iconic they are.
As for the game itself though, it also has its fair share of problems. Just to go through them really quickly, there are way too many enemies that can be on screen at once, a lot of items you need to grind money for, even very early on in the game, the control in order to do anything can be pretty wonky, even when doing something as simple as opening a menu, the bosses completely suck, you have to refight a good number of them multiple times, some of the NPCs don’t help you out whatsoever, and what is quite possibly the worst problem this game suffers from, the background and foreground. Everything in the areas you go to look the exact same when compared to each other, so there will be plenty of times where you can’t determine what you can and can’t interact with, leading to a lot of unneeded frustration. Granted, while a good amount of these problems are tweaked with in the remaster of the game, a lot of the problems are still there, making it still a pretty bad game at the end of the day.
With all that in mind though, I still managed to have a good time with the game. Yes, a lot of it is still pretty bad, and the game is repetitive enough to where it can get boring at times, but it did feel satisfying getting through a lot of these levels, and I did manage to have a fun time with slashing through these enemies and getting these items. Not to mention, a lot of the worse elements of the game, such as the cutscenes and the pathetic bosses, do add a lot of charm to the game in a way, and make it much more enjoyable. I always wanted to keep moving forward, because even if what I faced would be annoying, I would be given a garbage cutscene at the end of it, which makes up for everything at the end of the day. Seriously, when you hear Ganon say “Join me Link, and I will make your face the GREATEST in Koradai… or else you will DIE”, you simply just cannot completely hate this game. It is impossible.
Overall, despite the many, MANY problems that hold this game down, and the infamous reputation that it has gotten over the years, I surprisingly ended up really liking my time with Link: The Faces of Evil. Of course, a lot of that is thanks to the remaster, but even then, a lot of it I just can’t help but really like, and while I definitely probably won’t be playing it ever again, I am glad to say that I finally got to witness it in all of its glory. I would definitely recommend that any Zelda fan, or anyone in general, play or witness the game at least once in their lives, but for your own sake, DO NOT play the original version. Play the fan made remaster, because it manages to make the game a lot more bearable, while still keeping a lot of that awful charm perfectly intact. And hey, while we may all shit on these games for the dumpster fire that they are, we have to give them credit at the end of the day for inspiring many other works, such as this one game called Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore, which is being made to be a direct spiritual successor to this game, along with the other Nintendo CDI games. If you somehow aren’t excited for that game, then you my friend don’t know what true art is.
Game #438
Octopath Traveler
2018
This review contains spoilers
I have a lot of unkind things to say about Octopath Traveler, so let's start with the good stuff first.
The game's music is incredibly well crafted, with a lot of amazing tracks courtesy of Yasunori Nishiki, he absolutely killed it delivering some of the best battle music the genre has to offer alongside beautifully melancholic and subdued emotional tracks that resonate deeply with me. The way the music dynamically trasitions from character theme to boss battle theme never fails to pump you up for the coming fight, and traversal through towns and dungeons is always a treat with the backing tracks on offer.
The game pioneered a new visual style that's highly distinctive and evocative of retro SNES-era RPGs, and while I know HD-2D has its detractors, I'm not one of them. The spritework on the enemies and bosses is particularly impressive, with limited animation tastefully keeping the sprites' silhouettes intact while offering a degree of liveness to everything. The official artwork by Naoki Ikushima is breathtaking and I couldn't ask for a better interpretation of the sprites on screen than the gorgeous art for each of the 8 main characters.
Unfortunately that's about where the positives end in my eyes, because while I can appreciate the artistic merit of the visuals and music when divorced from the game, Octopath's game component is just about the antithesis of everything that draws me to an RPG.
So where to begin? The story and characters are a good jumping off point, because it's probably the aspect the game fumbles the hardest. Simply put, there is no meaningful interaction between the 8 heroes. They do not form a party, they do not share common goals, they are not fighting a common enemy, they are simply complete strangers to each other that for some reason still decide to tavel together despite never acknowledging their party during a single story beat in the entire game.
It's genuinely baffling that they would set up a game like this and then proceed to treat every single person as a lone wolf going through their own adventure, the dissonance between having to manage a party of 4 and having NONE of that show during a single story-important event gives me the worst ludonarrative whiplash I've ever experienced.
To the game's credit the characters DO talk to each other sometimes... in optional banter dialogue that is never important to the story. What happens when Alfyn must confront the criminal whose life he just saved out of the boundless mercy of his heart and Therion, the party's resident thief, is also there? Nothing. Therion has nothing to say. At all. No one else outside of Alfyn does.
The individual stories aren't even good. They don't come together nicely like the ones in LiveALive do, and the amount of chapters I can even remember off the top of my head can be counted on one hand. The vast majority of story events in this game are just excuses to send you to a dungeon and fight a boss. EVERY chapter is like this, formulaic to the point of absolute flatline EEG.
So by the end it really does feel like playing 8 unremarkable different stories that have ZERO crossover except for some reason the girl looking for her dad's assassins was also there when Tressa confronted an evil pirate.
If you really wanted to set the stories up like that, I don't see why you would't crib from from LiveALive and just... make 8 different stories that you can engage with separately.
But it doesn't just end at the writing and narrative structure, I also quite dislike this game's battle and job system. Octopath's main idea is that of breaking enemies by attacking them with a damage type they're weak to. The problem with this is that really, until broken, enemies don't take much damage at all, so every single battle in this game turns into a race to break stuff as fast as possible so that you can get it over with. This creates a strong imbalance since breaking an enemy only depends on the number of hits you can dish out, making moves that deal multiple hits way more valuable than anything else you could possibly use.
However, this type of move only starts popping up an ungodly amount of hours into the game, meaning that for a LONG time the battles are just exceedingly slow and boring. This also destroys the creativity in strategic play, since breaking an enemy always skips their turn there really is no better strategy than doing it ASAP and then nuking them with all the damage you have, rinse and repeat. That's the whole game. Some bosses do try to mix it up by covering some of their weaknesses, but I can't stress enough how one-dimensional this whole system is.
BP is another system that on the surface seems like it would add depth, it functions like a sort of turn storage that you can burn to either use the standard attack multiple times in a single turn, or enhance one of your command abilities. Characters gain 1 BP per turn and can choose to spend 1 to 3 points for their action. This system is not terrible, but I can't ignore Team Asano's previous effort with the Bravely games, which featured a rich, carefully considered and wonderfully executed system that's everything BP is and then some, with a great balance of risk and reward by allowing you to go into the negative and burn some turns in advance and skip them later.
Octopath's BP feels like a limp version of this that fails to bring back everything that made the Brave and Default system fun, only functioning as a battery to burn on breaks to get the maximum damage output out of every attack.
Because of the way breaking works, you really only spend BP to maximize your damage, and the system serves very little purpose otherwise, once again resulting in an extremely one-dimensional game plan.
Compounding the one-dimensional and slow combat (no, the game does NOT have a speed up function), I have more complaints about the general structure and progression of the game.
First off, your party gets a "leader" character who is the very first character you pick to start the game with. This serves zero purpose in the game, the leader does not get any special abilities nor do they get any extra dialogue, which is especially baffling because whoever you pick first is PERMANENTLY LOCKED as the only party member you can't change. They'll always be your first, and you can freely swap the other 3 at taverns.
This really does not make sense to me, if they're not gonna have ANY special reason to be locked in and every charatcer is basically equivalent and goes through their story regardless of their leader status or not, WHY is this even a thing.
I happened to get stuck with Primrose who I found out to be an especially poor choice of leader, having access to only 2 damage types for a large chunk of the game (the least of any character), and ZERO multihit moves, making her pretty much the single worst option for getting breaks.
Objectively there is really no reason not to pick Therion as your leader, he's the only character who can open blue treasure chests so you'll ALWAYS want him in your party unless you're just a fan of missing free items. No other character gets an ability like this so it's honestly a no brainer.
The level curve of this game is also all kinds of fucked up. Since your leader cannot be changed, they'll naturally sponge all the XP you can possibly get, while benched characters not actively in your party will receive NO experience, meaning that every time you need to advance one of their stories, it's time to grind them up to the game's recommended level for that chapter. This results in an ungodly amount of grinding, the likes of which even NES RPGs would blush at. I seriously cannot understand why they couldn't just let benched characters gain XP and JP with the rest of them, that would've made the game SO MUCH better paced it maybe wouldn't have to take 100 hours just to reach the ending on each of the 8 stories.
Since your leader will naturally always be your highest level character, you COULD let them take over for each story, but I had Primrose so lol, lmao. Grinding the other party members it was.
Jobs are also insanely boring. And grindy. You have 8 jobs, one per character, that you can also unlock for use as the secondary jobs of other characters. You spend JP to climb up each job's skill tree and unlock passive abilities to equip to one of your 4 slots, and active commands for that job. This is pretty much the same as Bravely, which is good, but the jobs themselves leave a lot to be desired, with all 8 of them getting essentially powercrept later in the game by the 4 secret ultimate jobs that are so much better than everything else it's not even funny. No reason to use the 8 "normal" jobs as secondaries when those ones exist.
That about sums up everything that led me to eventually detest playing this game, but the real kicker arrives at the true final boss.
Aside from being unlocked through a convoluted series of sidequests regarding the most forgettable characters ever (oh yeah this game has sidequests and they SOMEHOW have even less personality than the main stories), the final battle is incredibly disrespectful of the player's time, like all the grinding wasn't enough already.
The last save point before the true final boss is located right before a gauntlet of rematches of the 8 final chapter bosses that lead straight to the final battle split in two phases.
Not only is the final battle the only actually difficult fight of the game that requires you to think deeper than "break and nuke", if you die at ANY point of this, you need to kill the 8 assholes again before you get another crack at the final boss proper.
This is just awful, the last 8 assholes aren't hard, they're literally just wasting your time, and is yet another example of this game trying to ape LiveALive and failing miserably. I know people who installed PC mods or used collision glitches to beat the 8 assholes and then go back and save so they could ACTUALLY start experimenting and formulating a strategy against the final boss without wasting hours of their lives beforehand.
So in the end this is unfortunately one of the worst RPGs I've ever played, all the while nothing is even offensively bad, but it's such a fundamentally boring and unremarkable game on so many levels it genuinely makes me mad I decided to waste 100 hours of my life finishing the 8 main stories. It's a disappointing failure from a team whose output I previously adored, both Bravely Default and Second ranking among my absolute favorite games, and that's what stings the most.
I've been repeatedly told the second Octopath game is good actually, but I honestly do not wish to play it at any point after the dreadful experience this one was.
I'm at least glad Bravely is alive and well with Bravely Default 2, which I actually liked a fair amount, although not to the extent of the previous two. It seems the plan for Team Asano is to continue both series simultaneously, and I'm glad those who saw potential in Octopath get to enjoy a seemingly decent game. Me though, I don't think I'll lay a hand on this series ever again.
The game's music is incredibly well crafted, with a lot of amazing tracks courtesy of Yasunori Nishiki, he absolutely killed it delivering some of the best battle music the genre has to offer alongside beautifully melancholic and subdued emotional tracks that resonate deeply with me. The way the music dynamically trasitions from character theme to boss battle theme never fails to pump you up for the coming fight, and traversal through towns and dungeons is always a treat with the backing tracks on offer.
The game pioneered a new visual style that's highly distinctive and evocative of retro SNES-era RPGs, and while I know HD-2D has its detractors, I'm not one of them. The spritework on the enemies and bosses is particularly impressive, with limited animation tastefully keeping the sprites' silhouettes intact while offering a degree of liveness to everything. The official artwork by Naoki Ikushima is breathtaking and I couldn't ask for a better interpretation of the sprites on screen than the gorgeous art for each of the 8 main characters.
Unfortunately that's about where the positives end in my eyes, because while I can appreciate the artistic merit of the visuals and music when divorced from the game, Octopath's game component is just about the antithesis of everything that draws me to an RPG.
So where to begin? The story and characters are a good jumping off point, because it's probably the aspect the game fumbles the hardest. Simply put, there is no meaningful interaction between the 8 heroes. They do not form a party, they do not share common goals, they are not fighting a common enemy, they are simply complete strangers to each other that for some reason still decide to tavel together despite never acknowledging their party during a single story beat in the entire game.
It's genuinely baffling that they would set up a game like this and then proceed to treat every single person as a lone wolf going through their own adventure, the dissonance between having to manage a party of 4 and having NONE of that show during a single story-important event gives me the worst ludonarrative whiplash I've ever experienced.
To the game's credit the characters DO talk to each other sometimes... in optional banter dialogue that is never important to the story. What happens when Alfyn must confront the criminal whose life he just saved out of the boundless mercy of his heart and Therion, the party's resident thief, is also there? Nothing. Therion has nothing to say. At all. No one else outside of Alfyn does.
The individual stories aren't even good. They don't come together nicely like the ones in LiveALive do, and the amount of chapters I can even remember off the top of my head can be counted on one hand. The vast majority of story events in this game are just excuses to send you to a dungeon and fight a boss. EVERY chapter is like this, formulaic to the point of absolute flatline EEG.
So by the end it really does feel like playing 8 unremarkable different stories that have ZERO crossover except for some reason the girl looking for her dad's assassins was also there when Tressa confronted an evil pirate.
If you really wanted to set the stories up like that, I don't see why you would't crib from from LiveALive and just... make 8 different stories that you can engage with separately.
But it doesn't just end at the writing and narrative structure, I also quite dislike this game's battle and job system. Octopath's main idea is that of breaking enemies by attacking them with a damage type they're weak to. The problem with this is that really, until broken, enemies don't take much damage at all, so every single battle in this game turns into a race to break stuff as fast as possible so that you can get it over with. This creates a strong imbalance since breaking an enemy only depends on the number of hits you can dish out, making moves that deal multiple hits way more valuable than anything else you could possibly use.
However, this type of move only starts popping up an ungodly amount of hours into the game, meaning that for a LONG time the battles are just exceedingly slow and boring. This also destroys the creativity in strategic play, since breaking an enemy always skips their turn there really is no better strategy than doing it ASAP and then nuking them with all the damage you have, rinse and repeat. That's the whole game. Some bosses do try to mix it up by covering some of their weaknesses, but I can't stress enough how one-dimensional this whole system is.
BP is another system that on the surface seems like it would add depth, it functions like a sort of turn storage that you can burn to either use the standard attack multiple times in a single turn, or enhance one of your command abilities. Characters gain 1 BP per turn and can choose to spend 1 to 3 points for their action. This system is not terrible, but I can't ignore Team Asano's previous effort with the Bravely games, which featured a rich, carefully considered and wonderfully executed system that's everything BP is and then some, with a great balance of risk and reward by allowing you to go into the negative and burn some turns in advance and skip them later.
Octopath's BP feels like a limp version of this that fails to bring back everything that made the Brave and Default system fun, only functioning as a battery to burn on breaks to get the maximum damage output out of every attack.
Because of the way breaking works, you really only spend BP to maximize your damage, and the system serves very little purpose otherwise, once again resulting in an extremely one-dimensional game plan.
Compounding the one-dimensional and slow combat (no, the game does NOT have a speed up function), I have more complaints about the general structure and progression of the game.
First off, your party gets a "leader" character who is the very first character you pick to start the game with. This serves zero purpose in the game, the leader does not get any special abilities nor do they get any extra dialogue, which is especially baffling because whoever you pick first is PERMANENTLY LOCKED as the only party member you can't change. They'll always be your first, and you can freely swap the other 3 at taverns.
This really does not make sense to me, if they're not gonna have ANY special reason to be locked in and every charatcer is basically equivalent and goes through their story regardless of their leader status or not, WHY is this even a thing.
I happened to get stuck with Primrose who I found out to be an especially poor choice of leader, having access to only 2 damage types for a large chunk of the game (the least of any character), and ZERO multihit moves, making her pretty much the single worst option for getting breaks.
Objectively there is really no reason not to pick Therion as your leader, he's the only character who can open blue treasure chests so you'll ALWAYS want him in your party unless you're just a fan of missing free items. No other character gets an ability like this so it's honestly a no brainer.
The level curve of this game is also all kinds of fucked up. Since your leader cannot be changed, they'll naturally sponge all the XP you can possibly get, while benched characters not actively in your party will receive NO experience, meaning that every time you need to advance one of their stories, it's time to grind them up to the game's recommended level for that chapter. This results in an ungodly amount of grinding, the likes of which even NES RPGs would blush at. I seriously cannot understand why they couldn't just let benched characters gain XP and JP with the rest of them, that would've made the game SO MUCH better paced it maybe wouldn't have to take 100 hours just to reach the ending on each of the 8 stories.
Since your leader will naturally always be your highest level character, you COULD let them take over for each story, but I had Primrose so lol, lmao. Grinding the other party members it was.
Jobs are also insanely boring. And grindy. You have 8 jobs, one per character, that you can also unlock for use as the secondary jobs of other characters. You spend JP to climb up each job's skill tree and unlock passive abilities to equip to one of your 4 slots, and active commands for that job. This is pretty much the same as Bravely, which is good, but the jobs themselves leave a lot to be desired, with all 8 of them getting essentially powercrept later in the game by the 4 secret ultimate jobs that are so much better than everything else it's not even funny. No reason to use the 8 "normal" jobs as secondaries when those ones exist.
That about sums up everything that led me to eventually detest playing this game, but the real kicker arrives at the true final boss.
Aside from being unlocked through a convoluted series of sidequests regarding the most forgettable characters ever (oh yeah this game has sidequests and they SOMEHOW have even less personality than the main stories), the final battle is incredibly disrespectful of the player's time, like all the grinding wasn't enough already.
The last save point before the true final boss is located right before a gauntlet of rematches of the 8 final chapter bosses that lead straight to the final battle split in two phases.
Not only is the final battle the only actually difficult fight of the game that requires you to think deeper than "break and nuke", if you die at ANY point of this, you need to kill the 8 assholes again before you get another crack at the final boss proper.
This is just awful, the last 8 assholes aren't hard, they're literally just wasting your time, and is yet another example of this game trying to ape LiveALive and failing miserably. I know people who installed PC mods or used collision glitches to beat the 8 assholes and then go back and save so they could ACTUALLY start experimenting and formulating a strategy against the final boss without wasting hours of their lives beforehand.
So in the end this is unfortunately one of the worst RPGs I've ever played, all the while nothing is even offensively bad, but it's such a fundamentally boring and unremarkable game on so many levels it genuinely makes me mad I decided to waste 100 hours of my life finishing the 8 main stories. It's a disappointing failure from a team whose output I previously adored, both Bravely Default and Second ranking among my absolute favorite games, and that's what stings the most.
I've been repeatedly told the second Octopath game is good actually, but I honestly do not wish to play it at any point after the dreadful experience this one was.
I'm at least glad Bravely is alive and well with Bravely Default 2, which I actually liked a fair amount, although not to the extent of the previous two. It seems the plan for Team Asano is to continue both series simultaneously, and I'm glad those who saw potential in Octopath get to enjoy a seemingly decent game. Me though, I don't think I'll lay a hand on this series ever again.
CrossCode
2018
Perfect blend of artstyle, puzzles, and fast combat. Great if you're a zelda fan but want a less linear experience. Story is also excellent.
Super Mario RPG
2023
Way shorter than I remember but it’s still as good as it ever was, and the graphical/audio overhaul improves things while retaining the spirit of the original. Basically the best straight remake you could hope for!
Super Mario RPG
2023
Went into this with decent expectations while having never played the original and was blown away. Amazing game all the way through
Very mixed bag. Charming story and some very cute Link / Zelda moments. Improved upon PH in terms of dungeon puzzles and bosses which are often fantastic. While the game is at times great, there are things that make it very frustrating. There are an absurd amount microphone blowing mechanics (i dont think i have to explain to DS owners why this would be an issue. God forbid you try to play this on an emulator).
Quite a few otherwise very clever puzzles with phantom zelda also require finicky and annoying interaction with the DS touchscreen. I personally don't mind the stylus control scheme in PH and ST. It isnt ideal but it worked well enough in PH. The combat and movement mechanics in ST are generally more complex, however, especially in sections with Phantom Zelda. This increased complexity really reveals the flaws with the stylus control scheme. You will inevitably run into situations where you know exactly what to do but end up fumbling around with frustrating controls to do it.
Other than this the trains you ride for much of the game are very slow, and you lack means for convenient fast travel like the glyphs in PH. This wouldn't be a big issue if the train travel wasn't widely implemented but its an absolute core part of gameplay. You'll probably be spending 50% of your time in the game or more conducting your train - even more than this if you decide to do the side content, which is pretty much all transporting people and supplies in your train.
Overall this is a very charming and unique game with a lot of potential that gets bogged down by some pretty massive flaws. I would recommend that big Zelda fans play it for at least a couple hours to try it out. If you like it enough to keep going it can be an enjoyable experience. If you find it frustrating don't hesitate to put it down. There are far better Zelda games to spend your time on.
Quite a few otherwise very clever puzzles with phantom zelda also require finicky and annoying interaction with the DS touchscreen. I personally don't mind the stylus control scheme in PH and ST. It isnt ideal but it worked well enough in PH. The combat and movement mechanics in ST are generally more complex, however, especially in sections with Phantom Zelda. This increased complexity really reveals the flaws with the stylus control scheme. You will inevitably run into situations where you know exactly what to do but end up fumbling around with frustrating controls to do it.
Other than this the trains you ride for much of the game are very slow, and you lack means for convenient fast travel like the glyphs in PH. This wouldn't be a big issue if the train travel wasn't widely implemented but its an absolute core part of gameplay. You'll probably be spending 50% of your time in the game or more conducting your train - even more than this if you decide to do the side content, which is pretty much all transporting people and supplies in your train.
Overall this is a very charming and unique game with a lot of potential that gets bogged down by some pretty massive flaws. I would recommend that big Zelda fans play it for at least a couple hours to try it out. If you like it enough to keep going it can be an enjoyable experience. If you find it frustrating don't hesitate to put it down. There are far better Zelda games to spend your time on.
Pure fun, funny dialog, jokes and the story was pretty good. And ofcourse it was my childhood game